Maybe the newsletter writer had just been stabbed?
I would respect that kind of commitment.
I swear, I think the people who make this stuff must have never gotten over doing cheesy themes for high school yearbooks. Lots of pretty graphics, but they forgot to include directions to the place, which is hilarious, especially since they could have mocked up a treasure map. Basically they used a lot of pictures of parrots and boats, and then one page heading says "Walk The Plank Amusement!" Which... if that meant anything, it wouldn't mean anything good.
Ah, found the original BBC story. From 2004. Huh, you'd think that the talking psychic parrot could have been booked on a few talk shows since then....
[link]
Um, what?!
I'm thinking the writer means that half of all words used in English conversation could be found amongst the 100 most-common words.
Stupid fake pet communication trick
Heh.
Yeah, makes sense that the parrot had been exposed as a fraud years ago....
I'm glad Language Log caught that "deathlessly moronic" line. I imagine the parrot doesn't actually use the 100 common words like, say, definite and indefinite articles, pronouns, verbs...
Good lord that was a stupid assertion.
ETA: I mean, imagine! You only have to learn 100 words in English and you can read it pretty well!
The "project" site linked somewhere in there is pretty amusing, too
Aimee is part of an emerging group of conceptually based artists interested in exploring our human relationship with Nature in work dealing with animals, biology, environmental concerns, and quantum aspects of consciousness.
She's also well versed in Newspeak!
You would think that someone qualified to be a journalist would be able to understand the concept of grammar.
I ran across the link on Digg, which has a pretty low BS threshold or something.
Here's the Digg page: [link]
This comment cracked me up:
And finally - what's with the thousands of parrot articles posted by [user] iCEFX? Is this digg.com, news for parrots or something? Thought this site was about technology, not parrots, even if they are psychic.
Another great comment, sadly lacking in sarcasm:
I actually didn't believe this story until I saw that it came from the BBC.
